Mr Mobile review of a product I had my eye on for meeting notes, the Plaud Note:

Finally, there’s the question you really have to ask with any product like this. What company am I entrusting with these potentially sensitive recordings? Well, answering that led me down a fascinating rabbit hole into the world of so called registered agents, which are essentially companies that allow certain types of businesses to operate by giving them a physical address for legal purposes…in Wyoming, registered agents don’t seem to need to do any kind of vetting of the companies they represent.

This was not the way I expected the review to end, but it raised an interesting point. There is no claim of anything fishy going on with Plaid, but things like this are why I really love Michael’s reviews. He thinks deeper than most people would about a product that receives masses of our own, and other people’s, data.

Of course, he also raises this about the dozens of phones we do the same with, but this company in question is a bit of an enigma. Of course, if you want to achieve the same result, the alternative is to hand this data to Google or (Not so) OpenAI; however, I think I trust them more.

The type of data I would hand over using the Plaud Note would be personally and business sensitive, and I don’t think anyone should be doing this without knowing exactly who is processing it. With an endless sea of data brokers, that might not be 100% possible, but not knowing who the OEM is in the first place, hard pass from me.